For a lot of people, the word “coworking” conjures up images of small-scale startups and solopreneurs.
And while it’s certainly true that coworking spaces are home to many smaller businesses, they’ve also spawned some of the world’s biggest and most influential companies.
Here are six examples.
1. Uber
Uber was created in coworking spaces in New York City and San Francisco. Back in 2011, a team of 8, including the co-founders Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp operated from rocket space–a tech coworking space in San Francisco. Today, the business operates in 80 countries and has a valuation of over $75 billion.
2. Instagram
Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger were 26 and 24 when they worked at the now-famous San Francisco-based coworking space Dogpatch Labs where they created the app in 2010. Being in a coworking space gave them cost-savings and flexibility as they worked to get their app off the ground. On launch day, the app got its first users at 8:00 a.m. By 9:00 a.m., their server had already crashed due to all the traffic, and by 2:00 a.m., the platform had 25,000 users. Today, it has well over a billion monthly users.
3. Indiegogo
Instagram wasn’t the only massive business to emerge from a San Francisco-based coworking space. Indiegogo, the revolutionary crowdfunding platform which has raised more than $1.5 billion since its creation, also got its start in a flexible office space. In fact, the company’s founders, Slava Rubin, Eric Schell, and Danae Ringelmann have said that, had it not been for the support of coworking spaces, the company wouldn’t be what it is today.
4. Spotify
Do you know what Uber and Spotify have in common? Aside from being massive disruptors in their respective spaces, they were both founded at rocket space. Spotify launched in October of 2008. Today, it has more than 207 million monthly active users.
5. Hootsuite
Another product of rocket space in San Francisco, the idea for Hootsuite came as a eureka moment for founder Ryan Holmes, who had grown tired of logging into each of his social media accounts separately. This moment happened at a coworking space and the company’s founders are vocal about the impact of that space’s community on the business. They’ve even said they made valuable connections there that helped the company succeed. Today, Hootsuite has 15 million users, including more than 800 of the Fortune 1000 companies.
6. Wanderfly
Back in 2011, Christy Liu, co-founder of Wanderfly, described her start-up as “a travel inspiration site that helps people discover new experiences based on their budgets and interests.” She started the business with three other co-founders and a handful of employees working from a coworking space called Projective Space in Soho, New York. Just one year after it was launched, Wanderfly was bought by travel mega-site TripAdvisor for an undisclosed sum.
While all of these companies started off small, they all have two things in common: they started in a coworking space and they’ve now skyrocketed into some of the most massive corporations in the world.
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